Oct 20, 2012

Your Trivia For Today

The SSA [Social Security Administration] had some control over where numbers were issued
because of the early geographic distribution of the area number. The
lowest numbers went to the northeast states, and while Maine, the most
northeasterly of them, should have gotten the block of numbers starting
in 001, that group number actually went to New Hampshire.

This was
done so that the lowest possible SSN, 001-01-0001, could be given to
Social Security Board Chairman and former New Hampshire governor John G.
Winant. He passed on the number, so the SSA then offered it to John
Campbell, a Regional Representative of the Federal Bureau of Old Age
Benefits. He didn’t want it either. The SSA finally decided to just
assign it to the first New Hampshire applicant, Grace D. Owen of
Concord.